“I was a jack of all trades and I was a hard worker at all of them,” it says. “I built and sold several houses.”

Later on in the notice, after family survivors are listed by name and/or relation, there is a reference to an unnamed son.

“There was a child, a boy, who was put up for adoption,” Towill’s self-written obituary said. He also wrote about being “predeceased by a baby brother (who) was 11 days old.”

Towill’s obituary was submitted to The Herald by Margaret Lemieux, a half-sister who lives in Oyster Pond.

She said Thursday she found her brother’s undated, handwritten notice about a week ago when she was going over his personal effects, and was stunned. Lemieux said she had sent in a short obituary in September shortly after Towill died.

The handwritten version “was just in among other things, just as I was picking up one piece of paper at a time,” she said.

“I had to read it three or four times — bits and pieces of it were scratched out and he had made notes.”

Lemieux, a 73-year-old grandmother of six, said her brother was born in Halifax and died in hospital in Musquodoboit Harbour. He had long-term lung disease.

The first death notice for Towill was published Sept. 22, Lemieux said.

Although not an everyday occurrence — most newspaper obituaries are written by family members, close friends or funeral home officials — penning a notification of one’s own death is perhaps more common than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

The late Harry Flemming, the feisty and outspoken Nova Scotia journalist, wrote death notices for himself in two newspaper columns. He died in Halifax, in 2008, at age 74.

According to the Boston Globe, a writing instructor in Wisconsin teaches an online course: Put a Little Life into Your Obituary.

And there is a resource manual, published last year, that helps readers prepare their obits. Written by Craig C. Dunford, it is called Have The Last Word — Write Your Own Obituary (And Learn to Live).

At least one person has used a self-written obituary as a platform for a public confession.

A 59-year-old Utah man who died from cancer in July acknowledged he obtained a doctorate from the University of Utah because of a paperwork mistake. His obituary also included an admission of guilt about the 1971 theft of a motel’s safe.

Back in this country, Towill was a member of the Black Watch in the Canadian Armed Forces for a while and worked as a hard-rock miner in Manitoba. His obituary said he liked helping people, and “I enjoyed feeding the wild birds and watching them eat out of my hand.”

“I also had several tame, lame ducks as pets. It made me cry to see them die.”

Another development in the denouement of people’s lives, newspaper notices have shown, is more folks are resisting the societal convention of a final farewell.

Towill was one of them.

Lemieux said her brother told her if people didn’t come to visit him when he was alive, “he didn’t want them to come when he was dead.”